The Virtual Law School Library

Abstract

What do the next twenty years hold for law school libraries? How will they look in 2021? What will be in them? Who will use them? Will we still use books, or will everything be accessed through an electronic medium? These questions are canvassed in the context of a law school library that is, in 2001, uneasily poised at a junction where signposts point to alternative futures for the delivery of legal education itself.I. IntroductionWe seem, yet again, to be at one of those moments in time, so common in the last quarter of the 20th century, and likely to be continuous in the 21st, when the future appears as a melting pot of possibilities for law libraries, particularly university law libraries. This time the uncertainty is largely driven by the potential advent of Web-based learning, and the as yet largely undeveloped nature of the law school response to the possibilities of education outside of the traditional classroom model. Uncertainty is also due to the growing awareness that IT literacy is increasing rapidly among our user community, and that students in particular now prefer electronic sources of information over print – sources which, increasingly, they can access from places other than the physical law library.